Posts by Norris Roark

Rothwell:

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No similar artifacts have been found in any of the mainstream claims.

That's not the point. The artifacts in the Mizuno case were different from the several different artifacts in the Rossi case, and none of them resulted in the consuming of chemical fuel. I wasn't arguing that all artifacts are the same. Only that you can't eliminate artifacts because chemical fuel is not consumed.

The other point that those examples illustrate is that during the time before artifacts were identified, they nevertheless existed.

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The fact that errors were found in these experiments -- by me, in this case -- shows that errors are not all that difficult to find. In Rossi's case the errors were obvious at a glance.

It shows that *those* errors were easy to find. Not all errors are alike. And the fact remains that before the errors were found, it would have been a mistake to say they were ruled out.

Some of Rossi's errors were easy to spot for *some*, but in 2011, you said Rossi had the best evidence for cold fusion ever, and that one test was "irrefutable by first principles". And I'm not aware that you expressed skepticism about Rossi until the law suit in 2016. It was a mistake to "rule out" artifacts just because they were not identified to your satisfaction.

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There has to be a statue of limitations in science. The skeptics have had decades to find an error, but they have found none.

A statue of limitations? Would it be a statue of you? Or perhaps it should be the vulcan statue (see below).

Allowing that you meant "statute", are you high? I can't imagine anything more anti-science. You can't legislate something that has an objective and independent reality.

Are you also proposing thought police to enforce such a statute? And those who have thoughts contrary to your statute would be put under house arrest, as Galileo was? I suppose that's similar to the suggestion by a certain believer that there should be Nuremberg trials for skeptics, or the accusation in ECW that Bill Nye is as bad as Hitler and Stalin combined because he expressed skepticism about cold fusion.

That you could suggest something so ridiculous as a statute of limitations in science, and that 2 of your fellow believers liked the idea, just shows how cult-like your community has become.

When Le Verrier hypothesized planet Vulcan to explain the perihelion procession of Mercury, many amateur astronomers reported observations of the planet. The artifacts that produced those observations have *never* been identified, but with Einstein's general relativity, Vulcan is no longer needed to explain the peculiarities of Mercury's orbit, and the consensus is that the observations interpreted as planet Vulcan were artifacts. Your statute would require Vulcan to be a real planet. You may find some support for this among trekkies...

Similarly, in late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was erroneously believed that there were canals on Mars, and some people attributed them to intelligent life. Eventually (after several decades) it was revealed that the "canals" were an optical illusion (an artifact). Your statute would require that the reality of those canals had to be accepted.

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Nothing would ever be settled in science if all experiments were forever open to question.

Wow. You really don't have the first clue about science. Nothing is ever completely settled in science, and all experiments *are* forever open to question. Indeed, *that* is the message Popper was conveying with his treatise on falsifiability. The idea is to distinguish between scientific theories that are always subject to challenge (falsifiable) and religious dogma or presumably Rothwellian statutes, which are written in stone.

As Feynman said, "scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain".

It's obviously possible for the levels of certainty in LENR to change. But for it to become more believable among skeptics is going to take better evidence, not more argument. Given the closed minds exhibited by believers in LENR, and the religious nature of the belief that you so clearly exemplify, it's unlikely the level of certainty will change among believers, except possibly by attrition.

Rothwell:

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The skeptics would have to show there is an error for them to be right.

I get the feeling you're not reading most of my posts, because we're going in circles.

Skeptics do not have to identify an artifact to consider the possibility that there is one, any more than you have to identify a nuclear reaction to consider the possibility that there is one.

When someone shows you a blurry picture of what looks like a hairy monster and claims it's bigfoot, you don't have to identify what it really is to be skeptical that it's bigfoot, or that it's even an animal. People who were skeptical of the surgeon's alleged photo of the Loch Ness monster couldn't *show* it was a hoax, but they were right to be skeptical nonetheless.

In any case, you can't dictate to skeptics what they have to do to remain skeptical. It's a personal thing. You can only dictate what they have to do to affect your thinking.

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You can't just wave your hand and say "I think there might be an error, so this is wrong."

Nor can you just wave your hand and say you can't think of an artifact, so there isn't one.

But what skeptics do is look at the reported observations, at the kinds of artifacts that are common or typical in calorimetry experiments, and look at the evidence supporting nuclear reactions, and say that artifacts are more plausible than revolutionary nuclear reactions.

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That's not falsifiable, as I said.

Poor Popper probably rolls over in his grave every time people abuse his ideas this way. Do you really think Popper was arguing that if you can't think of an artifact to explain something, then it can't possibly be an artifact. That's absurd.

That's like arguing that until the subject of every blurry photo of bigfoot is identified as not being bigfoot, bigfoot must exist. But skepticism of bigfoot photos *can* be falsified by trapping bigfoot and plopping him down in front of the skeptics. In the same way, the suggestion that LENR claims are the result of artifacts can be falsified by getting better evidence for LENR. By identifying commensurate reaction products far above ambient levels, by increasing the size of the effect and running it without input, by powering your car for a year on a teaspoon of water, by replacing fossil fuels. You do this, and no one will suggest LENR claims are the result of artifacts. Therefore, artifacts are falsifiable.

Vague claims based on the process of elimination that the observations of heat are caused by nuclear reactions are far more difficult to falsify. One could as easily claim the heat comes from anti-matter reactions, or vacuum energy, or from an as yet undiscovered fifth force. Without evidence specific to nuclear reactions and commensurate with the alleged heat, artifacts are on the table. And experienced scientists, for the most part, consider them by far the most likely explanation.

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The experiments use conventional instruments & techniques going back 100 to 200 years, that have been used millions of times in experiments and in industry. Most of the experiments are performed by experts. There is no indication whatever that they made mistakes.

So, now you're arguing that cold fusion researchers are infallible. That their tools are old, and they are expert, and so they don't make mistakes. For a while you were more confident in Rossi's results than in any previous cold fusion results, and now you admit that he made mistakes. You argued Mizuno had evidence of LENR, but then you found he made mistakes. In 2001 you wrote "calorimetric errors are more common than researchers realize". No one is perfect.

Shane D:

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That is a double edge sword as yes, it shows problems with transportability in support of your anti-LENR belief, but also that high level military research facilities were successful in replicating LENR, which supports our pro-LENR beliefs.

That military research facilities have claimed replications is a matter of record; this quotation is not a new revelation of that. What it reveals is that a consistent recipe eluded them, and that suggests the observations are plausibly attributable to artifacts.

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Nonetheless, debate over, as BE seems to have licked the problem, which this excerpt from the SRI progress report shows:

Yes, well when these sorts of claims are made and well-supported *outside* the context of someone without qualifications, attracting millions in investment from philanthropists with even fewer qualifications, it might get interesting.

Alainco:

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... [skeptics] claim there is an artifact not describing an artifact,...

Likewise, advocates claim there is a nuclear effect without describing a nuclear effect.

It may be enough for non-scientists like you and Beaudette to accept LENR because of what you consider poor criticism of it. But most of the world requires good evidence to accept a claim as radical as cold fusion. And there isn't any good evidence in the judgement of most of mainstream science.

When the DOE enlisted a panel of experts to evaluate the best evidence, the panel did not consider the quality of the published critiques. They looked at the primary evidence and 17 of 18 did not consider the evidence for nuclear effects to be conclusive. It's the same judgement that the reviewers for the best journals and for granting agencies have reached repeatedly.

If you think trashing the critiques of 30-year old experiments is going to win acceptance for those 30-year old experiments within mainstream science, you are sadly mistaken. What would be needed to attract the attention of mainstream science again is new and better evidence, not more arguments about the old evidence.

The Beaudette argument clearly has some persuasive power among lay observers, and keeps them active in internet forums, but time has all but vindicated the skeptics. Whether the particular criticisms Beaudette refers to had merit isn't the point anymore. The point is that the claim of nuclear effects are not considered to have merit. If skeptics were not confident in their skepticism in the early 90s, they were probably confident that if cold fusion were real, the millionfold increase in energy density allegedly reachable at such easily accessible conditions would become unmistakeable with protracted efforts. But it didn't, and the confidence in skepticism has only increased.

When a new phenomenon is discovered, even if it is not understood, ordinary exploration of parameter space invariably leads to progress -- to bigger effects, more easily achieved. But if the phenomenon is the result of errors or artifacts, increased investigation leads to smaller effects, more difficult to achieve. This is what has happened in cold fusion.

Fleischmann and Pons claimed 170 W output with a COP of more than 4 in 1992, and even infinite COP in some cases. Then when McKubre reported a so-called replication in 1994, he reported a fraction of a watt with a COP of less than 1.1, and 5 years later, he admitted that with hindsight, he had been too optimistic. And in 2001, Rothwell lamented that researchers could not make the effect stand out; that most experiments only produce a fraction of a watt of power, when they work at all. And artifacts seem more consistent with a field in which one of the more prominent theorists (Hagelstein) and one of the more prominent experimentalists (McKubre) both admit that very little is agreed upon within the field.

You do know that Beaudette's book is 16 years old, and the experiment he defends so valiantly is scarcely being performed anymore. And that the publication rate has continued to decline, with no new claims of excess heat in electrolysis experiments in the refereed literature in more than a decade.

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Publish something to refute all the F&P papers in Journal of electroanalythical chemistry, and you will have a chance to be scientific.

I doubt that any journals would be interested in publishing arguments about 30 year old experiments that simply endorse an already strong consensus view. The J Electroanal Chem stopped publishing on the subject of cold fusion around the year 2000.

Anyway, given the current consensus, it is up to advocates to improve the evidence for their claim; to publish papers that exclude or reduce the possibility of artifacts as explanations, by identifying commensurate reaction products many times above background, by discovering critical parameters that allow the effect to be scaled up, and by demonstrating that this *source* of energy does not need its own source of energy.

Rothwell:

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The effect has been replicated at high signal to noise ratios in hundreds of major laboratories, in thousands of tests.

By the way, I'm puzzled by your numbers for a few reasons.

1) Why you think hundreds is a large number, when the far less significant phenomenon of high temperature superconductivity, discovered at about the same time, has been reproduced in many thousands of labs, and published in refereed literature more than a hundred thousand times. Cold fusion would surely dwarf these numbers if the evidence were solid.

2) If hundreds of major labs produced high sigma replications in such an important field, then they would not abandon it. And any major lab investigating a subject would be expected to publish several refereed papers on it per year. Doing the math, that should have resulted in tens of thousands of refereed papers. And yet, I'm not aware of any new experimental claim of excess heat in an electrolysis experiment in the last decade, and not more than a few claims of excess heat in other types of experiments. What are those hundreds of major labs doing now?

3) In 2009, you made a tally of replications in the literature, and came up with 153 papers, and you cast a pretty wide net to get to that number. And of course some groups are responsible for multiple papers in that list. That would say that fewer than 100 labs published replications that made your list. Now, whether it's a hundred or hundreds is not that important, but I wonder why you would inflate the figure like that if you were confident that the raw truth was sufficiently convincing.

Rothwell:

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This has been ruled out.

Well, that's where the disagreement lies. We know you think it has been ruled out, but if the skeptics you're arguing with agreed, there wouldn't be an argument.

The argument that the observations can be plausibly attributed to artifacts is not contradicted by the fact that chemical fuel is not consumed. None of the artifacts put forward to explain Rossi's or Mizuno's observations resulted in the consuming of chemical fuel. That's why I said it was not a logical argument against the possibility of artifacts.

On the other hand skeptics' arguments that there is an absence of good evidence for commensurate nuclear products *does* support the claim of artifacts.

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The effect has been replicated at high signal to noise ratios in hundreds of major laboratories, in thousands of tests.

This at least qualifies as an attempt to argue against artifacts, but I'm not convinced. It's the quality of the evidence, not the quantity that is important. Otherwise, I'd have to accept alien visitations as real.

Counting papers to establish legitimacy is characteristic of fringe science, but to my thinking, it supports the skeptical view. If there are so many alleged replications, but the results are erratic without any definitive scaling observations, and none of them are unequivocal, then that fits artifacts much more plausibly than it fits a claim of cold fusion.

And it's not just the skeptics who claim the results are erratic and equivocal. You yourself wrote in 2001 "Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real." That's 15 years ago, but you still cite work from before then as the best in the field.

The executive director at the Office of Naval Research, who had funded experiments by Miles and others said (from a NewScientist article in 2003): "For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that produced a result in one lab that you could reproduce in another,” Saalfeld says. “We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. We took very great care to do everything right. We tried and tried, but it never worked."

McKubre wrote in 2008 "… we do not yet have quantitative reproducibility in any case of which I am aware.", and " in essentially every instance, written instructions alone have been insufficient to allow us to reproduce the experiments of others." To most scientists, this means there is no reproducibility in the field. And that represents low quality evidence. And he emphasized it in 2016 when he said "there exists no consensus around an agreed set of facts."

A few years ago Hagelstein wrote "aside from the existence of an excess heat effect, there is very little that our community agrees on."

The very existence of the MFMP (which you said was exactly what was needed) is an admission that no unequivocal experiment has been established in LENR, because their first goal is to identify one.

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No skeptic in the history of cold fusion has ever found a meaningful error in any major experiment. (Claims by Shanahan and others are tin-foil-hat class delusions.)

And now we're back to identifying artifacts. First, dismissing Shanahan as delusional may play well to your choir, but your certainty won't convince skeptics. After all, you were certain about Rossi too.

Secondly, notwithstanding Shanahan, Jones, Cerron-Zeballos, Dmitriyeva, Faccini et al., and others who have published indications of errors or artifacts in cold fusion experiments, and the many more who have published negative results, it's not the responsibility of skeptics to find errors or artifacts. It's the responsibility of the claimants to exclude them, or at least make them far less likely than what they are claiming as an explanation.

And here's the parallel again: No advocate in the history of cold fusion has found a meaningful explanation for how a nuclear reaction can explain the results. And to be clear, I'm not dismissing a nuclear explanation for lack of a theory. I'm just saying you also can't dismiss artifacts for lack of a specific explanation.

And it wouldn't take a full blown nuclear theory to exclude artifacts. Just some kind of consistent explanation: evidence for commensurate reaction products, quantitative scaling with amount of fuel, reproducibly self-sustaining operation, would all make artifacts far less likely. In short, the researchers should be able to make the results stand out.

In the current situation, well represented by the above quotations, the observations are far more plausibly attributable to artifacts, errors, and confirmation bias than to unprecedented, largely radiation-free, nuclear reactions that are inconsistent with generalizations of a century of *experimental* results, and that somehow contrive to prevent discovery of their nature.

Rothwell:

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Furthermore, we know that cold fusion is a nuclear effect because it consumes no chemical fuel,

This is not a logical argument until you establish that the heat exceeds the input. That is, until you exclude the possibility that the apparent excess heat is the result of an artifact or mismeasurement, like the possibility you yourself suggested in the SRI measurement of the QPulse power.

Moreover, the formation of metal hydrides is exothermic, and so you have to establish that the observed heat is in excess of that chemical heat.

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and it produces tritium, and helium in the correct ratio for D+D fusion. Those are not theoretical claims, they are experimental observations.

If that claim were widely accepted, there would be no arguments like this in obscure web forums.

But it's not accepted, and probably not true. Maybe you're not familiar with the literature. There are no claims of commensurate tritium in the refereed literature, and the only claims of commensurate helium are even less persuasive than the claims of excess heat. The only claims of commensurate helium in the refereed literature are from Miles in the early 90s, and they are not credible and were challenged in the literature.

On the other hand, efforts to observe commensurate helium after Miles that *were* published in refereed journals are all negative. These include papers from Aoki in 1998, Gozzi in 1998, and Clarke in 2002 and 2003. All looked for helium in cells that had allegedly produced excess heat, but the He-4 was either absent or not definitive, much less commensurate. Clarke suspected that Case and others who claimed helium in non-refereed reports were the victims of systematic error.

One could add Arata's papers to this list; his papers were in Japanese journals, and claimed helium, but the levels (which are not easy to extract from his papers) appear to be orders of magnitude below commensurate levels.

Even McKubre said in 1998 in his EPRI report that "it has not been possible to address directly the issue of heat-commensurable nuclear product generation". He later changed his tune about the same data, after "reconsideration".

Finally, the best evidence for the claim of commensurate helium was presented to a panel of 18 experts enlisted by the DOE in 2004, and they were unconvinced. Nothing has been published in the past 12 years to change this assessment.

Rothwell:

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No, it is not parallel.

Yes. There is a parallel.

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When you say "I think that is an artifact" you are talking about experimental instruments and procedures.

No. It could be some kind of unexplained physical or chemical process. Like when Rossi claimed LENR in 2011, and you said he had provided the best proof ever in LENR. Alternative explanations were not immediately obvious, but over time, it became clear to most people that nuclear effects were not needed to explain the observations -- that wet steam, or stored heat, or misplaced thermocouples, among other things could explain it.

And yes, there could be instrumental or procedural misinterpretations, like the misinterpretations of emissivity in the Lugano paper. It took some time for that to be sorted out, and before it was, it was reasonable to remain skeptical. Another example is Mizuno's recent claim of LENR in an "adiabatic" system, where you argued for a long time that it had to be LENR, until finally you agreed that it was probably an artifact.

It is entirely scientific to search for such alternative explanations for experimental observations, even if they are as yet not understood or specified.

Whether it's instrumental or procedural or physical or chemical is not the point. The point is that just because you don't have a theory to explain something, doesn't mean it's not real, whether it's artifacts or all-new nuclear reactions.

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You have to be specific or your assertion cannot be falsified. That which cannot be falsified is not science.

You're mangling Popper. And Nobel laureates in science who dismiss LENR probably don't care if you think they're not being scientific.

Unspecific claims of artifacts *can* be excluded (falsified), or at least made less plausible than some unspecified and unprecedented nuclear reaction, which is exactly what the skeptics are asking for. You yourself have specified the kind of demo that would convince all scientists (an isolated thing that remains indefinitely warmer than its surroundings), and therefore falsify artifacts. If LENR replaced fossil fuels, artifacts would be very clearly falsified. You only need one example to show something is falsifiable. A vague claim that something is nuclear is far less falsifiable -- objections are met with the mantra that it is unknown, and therefore possible. How does one falsify that?

It is in fact the essence of being scientific to suspect artifacts or non-nuclear processes, even when you can't put your finger on them. Otherwise, every magic trick you can't *specifically* explain must actually be magic.

You yourself wrote that "calorimetric errors are more common than researchers realize". And Feynman wrote "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool." I take that to mean you should be suspicious of artifacts that might deceive your thinking, and do your best to exclude them.

And Garwin suggested a number of possible artifacts, and how they could be checked, but it didn't happen. Instead. 5 years later, McKubre backtracked, writing in his EPRI report that "with hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat production was premature". He seems to have abandoned that particular experiment after that.

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On the other hand, when you say "I have an effect that cannot be explained" that is science. It is the very essence of science, which is the effort to explain things we do not understand. Saying there is no theory to explain a result is always okay. You can never go the other way and point to theory to show that a result is wrong. When the two conflict, replicated experiments always win and theory always loses. Nothing is more fundamental to the scientific method. The experiment is the one and only standard of truth.

Yes, and bears shit in the woods, and the pope is catholic.

Exactly who are you preaching to? Everyone agrees with this. It's motherhood. And it is entirely consistent with what I said. I just argued that you can't rule out artifacts just because there's no artifact theory either.

The effort to explain things should include an effort to find mundane explanations as well as exotic explanations. *That* is how science is done. And in Rossi's case, in every demonstration or "validation" so far, it has been found that exotic explanations are not needed, even though you were absolutely convinced that experiment demanded exotic explanations. You have to learn to keep an open mind.

Again, I'm not saying you have to exclude nuclear explanations because there is no specific theory for them; I'm saying you shouldn't exclude artifacts because there is no specific theory for *them*. That's the parallel.

When neither mundane nor exotic explanations are well defined, then scientists make judgments based on likelihood, the evidence, and their experience. And in the matter of LENR, the weak and erratic and inconsistent nature of the results ("There exists no consensus around an agreed set of facts" -- McKubre), has led to an overwhelming consensus that the observations are more plausibly attributable to artifacts, errors, and confirmation bias, than to unprecedented, unidentifiable, largely radiation-free, nuclear reactions that are inconsistent with generalizations of a century of *experimental* results.

"Oh so you found anomalous heat did you...OK, great, what is your theory...oh yeah, well that does not fit with standard physics...hahaha, gotcha...LENR cannot be real, bye, bye".

I didn't actually dismiss the idea of it being nuclear that way, but if I had, it would have been because that's how you dismissed the idea that it is an artifact. "No theory for your artifact? Then it can't be an artifact. Bye bye." There's a parallel, you see.

And it's not just that the theory doesn't fit with standard physics, but that there isn't an agreed upon theory, and the various disparate theories that have been suggested don't fit the experimental observations, and that's because the experimental observations don't fit with each other.

Of course you don't need a theory to accept an experimental observation. But to accept an interpretation, one weighs the evidence, and if the evidence is no better for an unlikely explanation than it is for a common one, well...

McKubre may have known what he was doing, but according to him, even after a quarter century of researchers knowing what they're doing, "There exists no consensus around an agreed set of facts". Artifacts, which are intrinsically erratic and unpredictable, fit that scenario better than a nuclear explanation.

"they could find no specific artifact during their one day visit."

So, Garwin said it could be artifact, although he couldn't think of a specific artifact.

And McKubre said is could be nuclear, although he couldn't think of a specific nuclear mechanism.

Unexpected calorimetry artifacts of that sort are far more common than unprecedented nuclear reactions in that situation.

Quote from Shane D.

Norris,

Joshua Cude always discredited McKubre by claiming he was not really with SRI either, as he was not listed on their roster, but he was an employee who just retired. Tanzella has been there many years, and I have no doubt he is employed, and probably the leader of the LENR team there. Maybe it is SRIs personal disclosure policy or something. And also, SRI is a very big institution, doing groundbreaking R/D in many disciplines, so maybe they felt endorsing a proprietary report mean't for BEs internal use, was not warranted? Who knows, and anyways a tweet is better than nothing. Heck, in LENR that may be as good as it gets.

I also don't doubt that Tanzella works at SRI and leads the LENR program. But it's just a little less impressive if SRI has a "personal disclosure policy or something" that keeps them from listing Tanzella and LENR on their web site. How would such a policy work? Topics that do not have convincing evidence of validity shall not be listed on our site??

If a "proprietary report meant for BEs internal use" does not warrant space on their web site, when BE itself publicizes it, then that exhibits less confidence than if they do give it space, is all I'm saying.

Sure, a tweet is better than nothing, but even the tweet is cautious. It doesn't say "SRI validates LENR". It says some SRI researchers report replication. There is no shame in having employees who are not infallible. And how much can you trust a guy who writes "per say" when he means "per se"?

The problem is that Tanzella's entire career appears to be in LENR research, so if it's not vindicated, it will be a sad retirement.

As for SRI, it would be nice to see some solid support from the *company*. Yes, there's a tweet that announces the press release. But their web site does not acknowledge it, or even that SRI has a LENR program. And Tanzella does not appear to be high enough in the ranks to be listed as an employee (and the employee list is long).

ETA: I you search for LENR or Tanzella on the SRI site, it does generate an automated list of links to all mentions of SRI in the press with those search terms, including the press release. But neither appear on an SRI hosted page, that I could find.

Quote from Alan Smith

Quote from Norris Roark: “Hasn't Godes been claiming a COP around 4, meaning excess heat 3 times input.

This result is more like excess heat 0.3 times input.

Is a result 10 times smaller accurately called a replication?”

You are confusing 'investment grade' measurements with 'scientific grade' ones. That is often a problem in this field of research...

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Presumably the different standards required for investment and for science explains why there are so many successful "free" energy scams, and so few successful "free" energy solutions.

Hasn't Godes been claiming a COP around 4, meaning excess heat 3 times input.

This result is more like excess heat 0.3 times input.

Is a result 10 times smaller accurately called a replication?

Ah, maybe the web site just needs more time. Some of the stories on their news page seem less significant, but also older.

It would be more impressive if it were promoted (or at least mentioned) on the SRI web site.

The writing, "per say", seems inexperienced, uncharacteristic of SRI.